Category Archives: Writing Exercises

Newly decorated columns greeted Detective Finees as he crouch-walked under the tape. Faded yellow stripes, neat in lines on both the floor and support beams of the old parking garage, now drenched in some poor bastard’s buckets of red. Continue reading Prints→

The writing group is in the midst of our annual Story Every Day event. We’re all doing our best to churn out 500+ word stories or scenes each day. I have two so far, for a total of about 1900 words, which is more than I’ve written in ages.

The two are connected, emerging from the things that have been on my mind a lot lately, as I discussed a couple posts back. The world is shaping up in my mind, but I’m playing it pretty fast and loose. I don’t know if these are stories and characters I’ll be using in the final…novel?…but it’s a fun way to world build.

President Abraham Lincoln and his crack special forces team battle the Confedabot, a twenty-foot-tall doomsday machine. Lincoln himself delivers the killing blow to Florida Senator Augustus Maxwell, who had been controlling the Confedabot via psychic broadcasts. Ten miles away, the Gettysburg address is delivered by a projectogram hidden in Ward Hill Lamon’s hat.

Occasionally on Facebook I post these little “historical” factoids as my status for fun. I like to think they’re more interesting than “OMG I hate Mondays” or whatever. Some are funny, some are simply dramatic. I’m obviously not the first to do this, but they’re fun to write and make nice little exercises to keep the brain working.

There’s more room there than on Twitter, so I can do things a little more involved without that shorter character limit. But even then, sometimes I don’t have enough space. Today’s was one of those where I wanted to embellish more, but didn’t have the space.

At any rate, I thought I’d start posting those here, and more of them, as regular content. With any luck, some will grow into fuller stories. Also, here they won’t eventually vanish into the Facebook ether at some point. You guys can let me know which ones you think are cool and which ones are dead ends.

So here’s the first.

This day in history, 2108: Begin the great Cephalopod Invasion. By midnight, Octopus Prime conquers Manhattan, his enormous tentacles cutting a swath of destruction across New York and New Jersey. His amphibious army seizes ports throughout the Eastern Seaboard. They retreat a week later, leaving behind cities completely depleted of human life. Typed missives inform the beleaguered nation that they attack only to remind us why the month is named October – and to replenish their supply of human slaves.

(I have some totally awesome ideas about the Cephalapod Marine force, so I’m looking forward to expanding this one.)

The Writer’s Ink crew had an excellent meeting the other night, and it was decided as a group goal that we’ll all be trying to write some 250 words a day during October. This is something we should be doing anyway, as a matter of policy, but I think various things have been conspiring to keep many of us from productivity this past year. We are hoping to get back at it!

I know I, for one, have not gotten nearly enough rejection letters this year.

Not really sure where this one was going, but I kind of like the beginning. I was up late watching Whale Wars the other day. People that feel so strongly about issues that (ultimately) don’t affect them interest me, regardless of the cause. I have no idea what it’s like to be that passionate about anything, unless we’re talking about casting Summer Glau in a Scarlet Ranger television series.

This might be another solid one, though it’ll need a lot of polish, it’s quite rough. An early adventure of a certain masked heroine. Perhaps the most fun writing this was coming up with her terrifically horrible early ’80s costume (the Doc Martens go without saying, of course). Brief excerpt after the jump.

I almost forgot, but the writing group is doing our annual Story Every Day contest this month. For the next couple of weeks we’ll be churning out a short story every single day. It is crazy!

Thanks to some forgetfulness and a minor communications snafu, we’re actually starting today instead of yesterday like we’d originally intended. But no biggie. So I’ll be trying to post excerpts of my attempts each day.

This is a little of what I wrote last night at the write-in to kick things off. I thought this might serve as a good companion piece to a story I’ll have appearing in A Thousand Faces later this year.

As you can see to the right, I’ve added a new column, within which you can see daily nuggets of fiction. I’m not totally satisfied with it, as I’m using Twitter to create the feed, and from time to time the character limit is a beast to deal with. But it will do for the moment. I’ll be posting material from my daily hint fiction exercise I did last year and mixing in something new as often as possible.